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By any measure, the rise of the Stone Roses was a sudden and extraordinary thing. It unfolded during a span of one year. At the beginning of 1989, they were just a regional source of buzz in Manchester, largely overlooked by the established channels for indie music in Britain. Influential DJs did not champion them. The rock journalism had hardly mentioned their most recent single, Elephant Stone. They were barely able to fill even a smaller London venue such as Dingwalls. But by November they were massive. Their single Fools Gold had entered the charts at No 8 and their performance was the big attraction on that week’s Top of the Pops – a scarcely conceivable state of affairs for the majority of indie bands in the end of the 1980s.

In retrospect, you can find any number of reasons why the Stone Roses cut such an extraordinary path, obviously attracting a far bigger and more diverse crowd than usually showed enthusiasm for alternative rock at the time. They were set apart by their appearance – which seemed to align them more to the expanding acid house movement – their confidently defiant demeanor and the skill of the guitarist John Squire, unashamedly masterful in a scene of fuzzy aggressive guitar playing.

But there was also the undeniable truth that the Stone Roses’ rhythm section swung in a way entirely unlike any other act in British alternative music at the time. There’s an point that the melody of Made of Stone sounded quite similar to that of Primal Scream’s old C86-era single Velocity Girl, but what the rhythm section were playing underneath it certainly did not: you could move to it in a way that you simply couldn’t to the majority of the songs that graced the turntables at the era’s alternative clubs. You in some way felt that the percussionist Alan “Reni” Wren and the bass player Gary “Mani” Mounfield had been brought up on sounds rather different to the standard alternative group influences, which was absolutely correct: Mani was a huge fan of the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman but his main inspirations were “good Motown-inspired and funk”.

The smoothness of his playing was the secret sauce behind the Stone Roses’ eponymous first record: it’s Mani who drives the moment when I Am the Resurrection shifts from soulful beat into loose-limbed funk, his octave-leaping lines that put a spring in the step of Waterfall.

At times the sauce was quite obvious. On Fools Gold, the focal point of the song is not the singing or Squire’s wah-pedal-heavy guitar work, or even the drum sample taken from Bobby Byrd’s 1971 single Hot Pants: it’s Mani’s writhing, driving bass. When you think of She Bangs the Drums, the initial element that springs to mind is the low-end melody.

In fact, in Mani’s opinion, when the Stone Roses stumbled musically it was because they were not enough groovy. Fools Gold’s underwhelming follow-up One Love was underwhelming, he suggested, because it “needed more groove, it’s a somewhat rigid”. He was a strong defender of their oft-dismissed second album, Second Coming but thought its weaknesses might have been fixed by removing some of the layers of Led Zeppelin-inspired guitar and “returning to the rhythm”.

He may well have had a point. Second Coming’s handful of highlights usually coincide with the moments when Mounfield was truly given free rein – Daybreak, Love Spreads, the superb Begging You – while on its more turgid songs, you can hear him metaphorically willing the band to pick up the pace. His performance on Tightrope is totally at odds with the lethargy of everything else that’s going on on the song, while on Straight to the Man he’s clearly attempting to add a some pep into what’s otherwise some nondescript country-rock – not a genre one suspects listeners was in a rush to hear the Stone Roses give a try.

His efforts were unsuccessful: Wren and Squire left the band in the wake of Second Coming’s release, and the Stone Roses collapsed completely after a catastrophic headlining set at the 1996 Reading festival. But Mani’s subsequent role with Primal Scream had an impressively galvanising impact on a band in a slump after the tepid response to 1994’s rock-y Give Out But Don’t Give Up. His sound became dubbier, heavier and increasingly fuzzy, but the groove that had provided the Stone Roses a point of difference was still present – particularly on the low-slung funk of the 1997 single Kowalski – as was his ability to push his bass work to the front. His percussive, mesmerising bass line is very much the highlight on the fantastic 1999 single Swastika Eyes; his playing on Kill All Hippies – similar to Swastika Eyes, a highlight of Xtrmntr, undoubtedly the best album Primal Scream had produced since Screamadelica – is magnificent.

Always an affable, clubbable figure – the writer John Robb once noted that the Stone Roses’ aloofness towards the media was always punctured if Mani “became more relaxed” – he took the stage at the Stone Roses’ 2012 reunion concert at Manchester’s Heaton Park playing a customised bass that displayed the inscription “Super-Yob”, the nickname of Slade’s outrageously coiffured and permanently smiling axeman Dave Hill. This reformation failed to translate into anything more than a lengthy series of hugely profitable gigs – two new tracks put out by the reformed quartet served only to prove that any magic had been present in 1989 had turned out unattainable to recapture 18 years on – and Mani discreetly announced his departure from music in 2021. He’d earned his fortune and was now more concerned with fly-fishing, which additionally provided “a great reason to go to the pub”.

Maybe he thought he’d achieved plenty: he’d definitely left a mark. The Stone Roses were seminal in a range of manners. Oasis certainly took note of their swaggering approach, while the 90s British music scene as a movement was shaped by a aim to break the usual market limitations of indie rock and attract a wider mainstream audience, as the Roses had done. But their clearest direct influence was a sort of groove-based shift: in the wake of their initial success, you abruptly couldn’t move for alternative acts who wanted to make their fans dance. That was Mani’s artistic raison d’être. “It’s what the rhythm section are for, right?” he once averred. “That’s what they’re for.”